The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “It stands to reason,” he said, expanding. “What do they get to eat? Dried meat and manioc covered in bird droppings, fish that tastes of newspaper from the bloody river. No fresh milk, no fresh meat, no fresh vegetables—everything has to be flown in and they can’t afford it. It would kill them if they could.”

  McDowell shook his head and kept his knees still. “Catholic country,” he said.

  “No topsoil,” said the vice-consul, putting on a swagger. “If you’ve got a pain in the jaw, I’m sorry. Take my advice and do what I do. Get on the next plane to Miami. Or Puerto Rico if you like. It’ll cost you a penny or two but it’s the only way. Sorry for you. Painful.”

  “Oh,” said McDowell, sitting back like an idol. “My teeth are all right,” he said.

  “Then what do you want a dentist for?”

  “It’s my dentures,” McDowell said, gleaming as he made the distinction.

  “All right—dentures,” said the vice-consul.

  “They’ve gone. Stolen.”

  The vice-consul looked at McDowell for a long time. The jaws did not move, so he turned sideways and now studied McDowell, screwing up one annoyed eye. The man swallowed.

  “Mr McDowell,” he said, taking the syllables one by one. “Are you feeling the heat? Just give your mouth a tap. If I’m not mistaken, you’re wearing them.”

  McDowell let his arms fall to his sides and parted his lips: a set of teeth gleamed as white and righteous as a conjuring trick. “I never sail without me spares,” he said.

  The vice-consul wasn’t going to stand funny business from British subjects. He had an air for this.

  “Very wise,” he said. “You fellows are always getting your teeth knocked out by your pals. Makes you careful, I suppose. What do you want me to do? You’ve got a captain, haven’t you?” He became suspicious. “I suppose you’re not thinking of Filing an Official Complaint,” he said, pulling a form out of his drawer, waving it at McDowell and putting it back, “because I can tell you, officially, that who pinches what from whom on the bloody Ivanhoe is no concern of mine, unless it’s connected with mutiny, wounding, murder or running guns.”

  The vice-consul knew this kind of speech by heart.

  The sun had floundered down into the clouds; he shouted to his clerk to put on the light but switched it on himself. He decided to match McDowell on the meaning of words.

  “You said ‘stole,’ McDowell. You must have some prize thieves in your crew. But will you tell me how you get a set of dentures out of a man’s head against his will, even when he’s asleep, unless he’s drugged or tied up. Were you drunk?”

  “I’ve never touched a drop in my life,” said McDowell.

  “I suppose not,” said the vice-consul coldly.

  “I took them out myself. I always put my dentures in a glass.”

  “So I should hope,” said the vice-consul. “Filthy leaving them in. Dangerous too. What else did they take? Watch? Wallet? Glasses?”

  McDowell spoke carefully, picking over the peculiarity of an austere and personal case. “Only my dentures,” he said. “It wasn’t the crew. I don’t mix with them. They read magazines. They never think. I wasn’t aboard,” he said softly, adding to his mystery. “It wasn’t at night. I was ashore. In the afternoon. Off duty.”

  The Indian clerk put his head in at the door and looked anxiously from McDowell to the vice-consul.

  “What do you want now? Can’t you see I’m busy?” said the vice-consul.

  The man’s head disappeared and he shut the door.

  McDowell stretched his long arms and placed his hands on his knees and his fingers began to drag at his trousers. “I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “I saw this girl with them. When the rain started.”

  “What girl?” the vice-consul said, lighting a cigar and putting a haze of smoke between himself and his torment. “The rainy season started six weeks ago,” he swaggered. “You get your thunderstorm every afternoon. They come in from the west and build up over the river at two o’clock to the minute and last till ten past three. You can set your watch by them.”

  The vice-consul owned the climate.

  “Tropical rain,” he said grandly, “not the drizzle you get in Belfast. The rain comes down hot, straight out of the kettle, floods the streets and dries up in ten minutes, not a sign of it except the damn trees grow a foot higher. The trouble is that it doesn’t clear the air: the heat is worse afterwards. You feel you’re breathing—I don’t know—boiled stair carpet my wife says, but that’s by the way.” He waved at the smoke. “You’ll tear the knees of those trousers of yours if you don’t leave them alone.”

  A dressy man, he pointed his cigar at them. McDowell’s knees stuck out so far that the vice-consul, who was a suspicious man, felt that they were making a displeasing personal claim on him. They indeed gave a jump when McDowell shouted in a voice that had the excitement of sudden fever, “I can stand thunder. But I can’t stand lightning, sheet or forked. It brings my dinner up. It gets under your armpits. A gasometer went up in Liverpool when I was a boy and was blown blazing across the Mersey—”

  “I thought you said you came from Belfast,” said the vice-consul. “Lightning never bothers me.”

  “There was this thunderbolt,” said McDowell, ignoring him, and his voice went to a whisper. “I’m in the entrance of this hotel, looking at the alligator handbags to take one home for my wife and I’ve just picked one up and down comes this bolt, screaming behind my back, with a horrible violet flame, and sends me flying headfirst up the passage. There’s a girl there, polishing the floor, and all the lights go out. The next thing, I’m in an open doorway, I’m pitching headfirst on to a bed in the room and I get my head under the clothes. It’s like the end of the world and I’m praying into the pillow. I think I am dead, don’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” said the vice-consul coldly. “But what do you do at sea? And where was this place?”

  “It’s natural at sea,” said McDowell, calming down. “The Columbus. Yes, it would be the Columbus.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the vice-consul.

  “I don’t know how long I am there, but when it gets quieter I look up, the lightning is going on and off in the window and that’s when I see this girl standing by the mirror—”

  “The one who was polishing the floor, I suppose,” said the vice-consul with contentment.

  “No,” said McDowell, “this one was in the bed when I fell on it, on top of her, I told you.”

  “You didn’t. You pulled her in,” said the vice-consul.

  McDowell stopped, astonished, but went on, “Standing by the mirror, without a stitch of clothing on her. Terrible. She takes my dentures out of the glass, and the next thing, she opens her mouth wide and she’s trying to fit them, this way and that, to her poor empty gums.”

  “You couldn’t see all that in a flash of lightning. You must have switched the light on,” said the vice-consul.

  McDowell slapped his knee and sat back in a trance of relief. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “Thank God you reminded me. I wouldn’t want to tell a lie. The sight of her with her poor empty mouth destroyed me. I’ll never forget it. It’d break a man’s heart.”

  “Not mine,” said the vice-consul. “It’s disgusting. Shows ignorance too. No two human jawbones are alike.”

  “The pitiful ignorance, you’re right!” said McDowell. “I called out to her, ‘Careful what you’re doing! You might swallow them. Put them back in the glass and come back to bed.’ ”

  The tropical hoarseness left the vice-consul’s voice. “Ah,” he shouted and put his cigar down. “I thought we’d come to it. In plain English, you had come ashore to commit fornication.”

  “I did not,” said McDowell, shocked. “Her sister works for the airline.”

  “Oh, it’s no business of mine. I don’t care what you do, but you were in bed with that girl. You said so yourself. But why in God’s name did you take your dentures out? In the mid
dle of the afternoon?”

  McDowell was even more shocked. He sat back sternly in his chair. “It would have looked hardly decent,” he said, “I mean on an occasion like that, for any man to keep his teeth in when a poor girl had none of her own. It was politeness. You’d want to show respect. I’ve got my principles.”

  He became confident and said, “My dentures have gold clips. Metal attracts lightning—I mean, if you had your mouth open, you might be struck dead. That’s another reason why I took them out. You never know who the Lord will strike.”

  “Both of you, I expect,” said the vice-consul.

  “Yes,” said McDowell, “but you’ve got to think of others.”

  The vice-consul got out his handkerchief and wiped his face and his head.

  “You’d never get away with this twaddle in a court of law,” said the vice-consul. “None of this proves she stole your dentures.”

  “She had gone when I woke up, and they had gone. The rain was pouring down outside or I would have gone after her,” said McDowell.

  “And you wouldn’t have caught her if you had,” said the vice-consul with deep pleasure. “She sold them before she got to the end of the street. You can say goodbye to that lot. You’re wasting my time. I’ve got two other British ships docking in an hour. I’ve told you what to do. Keep clear of the police. They’ll probably arrest you. And if you want a new set of dentures, go to Miami as I said.”

  “But they’re not for me,” exclaimed McDowell. “I want them for this girl. I’ve got the money. It’s wrong to steal. Her sister knows it and so does she. If you see a soul in danger, you’ve got to try and save them.”

  “God help me,” said the vice-consul. “I’ve got enough trouble in this port as it is, but as a matter of interest, who told you to go to this place—the Columbus—to buy handbags? You can get them at every shop in the town. The river’s crawling with alligators.”

  McDowell nodded to the outer office where the Indian clerk sat. “That gentleman.”

  “He did, did he?” said the vice-consul, laughing for the first time and achieving a louder shout to his clerk.

  The Indian clerk came in. He loved to be called in when the vice-consul was talking business. He gleamed with the prestige of an only assistant. The vice-consul spoke to him in Portuguese with the intimacy of one who sketches his way through a language not his own. The clerk nodded and nodded and talked eagerly.

  “My clerk says,” said the vice-consul, in his large way, “that you came in at midday the day before yesterday and asked where you could get a girl. He says he knows the airline girl and her sister. He knows the whole family. The father has the barbershop opposite the church and he is a dentist too. He buys up teeth, mostly after funerals.”

  The clerk nodded and added a few words.

  “He says he fixed him up. He says this man’s got the biggest collection of teeth in the town.”

  The clerk’s neck was thin; he was like wood. He opened his mouth wide with pride for McDowell to see. There were five sharp steel teeth and two with gold in them.

  The vice-consul went on, “He says he often sells them to missionaries. The Dominicans have a mission here. The poor devils come back from far up in the Indian settlements looking like skeletons after three years and with their teeth dropping out. I told you: no calcium. No fresh vegetables. No milk. The climate …”

  The Indian said no more.

  McDowell got up and moved towards the clerk suspiciously, setting his chin. “What’s he say about the Dominicans?” said McDowell in a threatening way.

  The vice-consul said, “He says you could go down to this man, this barber chap, and you might find your teeth.”

  The Indian nodded.

  “If you don’t—well, they’ve been snapped up and are being flown up the river. Sorry, McDowell, that’s all we can do. Take my advice and get back double-quick to your ship. Good day.”

  The vice-consul picked up some papers and called to McDowell as he left the room, “They’ll be up there, preaching The Word.”

  The following day the vice-consul went out to the Ivanhoe to have a last drink with the captain and to have a look at the puma, and grinned when it opened its mouth and snarled at him. The captain said McDowell would be all right once he got to sea, and went on to some tale about a man who claimed to have a cat that backed horses.

  It’s the bloody great river that does it, the vice-consul thought as he was put ashore afterwards and as he walked home in the dark and saw all the people whispering in their white cotton clothes, looking like ghosts. He was thinking it was only another year before his leave and that he was the only human being in the town.

  (1980)

  THE FIG TREE

  I checked the greenhouses, saw the hose taps were turned off, fed the Alsatian, and then put the bar on the main gate to the Nursery and left by the side door for my flat. As I changed out of my working clothes I looked down on the rows of labelled fresh green plants. What a pleasure to see such an orderly population of growing things gambling for life—how surprising that twenty years ago the sight of so much husbandry would have bored me.

  When I was drying myself in the bathroom I noticed Sally’s bathcap hanging there and I took the thing to the closet in the bedroom, and then in half an hour I picked up Mother at her hotel and drove her to Duggie and Sally’s house, where we were to have dinner. I supposed Mother must have seen Sally’s bathcap, for as we passed the Zoo she said, “I do wish you would get married again and settle down.”

  “Dutch elm disease,” I replied, pointing to the crosses on one or two trees in the Park.

  The Zoo is my halfway mark when I go to Duggie and Sally’s—what vestiges of embarrassment I feel become irrelevant when I have passed it.

  “It worries your father,” Mother said.

  Mother is not “failing.” She is in her late seventies and Father was killed in the war thirty years ago, but he comes to life in a random way, as if time were circular for her. Father seems to be wafted by, and sows the only important guilt I have—I have so little memory of him. Duggie has said once or twice to Sally that though I am in my early forties, there are still signs that I lacked a father’s discipline. Duggie, a speculative man, puts the early whiteness of my hair down to this. Obviously, he says, I was a late child, probably low in vitality.

  Several times during this week’s visit I have taken Mother round the shops she likes in London. She moves fast on her thin legs, and if age has shortened her by giving her a small hump on her shoulders, this adds to her sharp-eyed, foraging appearance. She was rude, as usual, to the shop assistants, who seemed to admire this—perhaps because it reminded them of what they had heard of “the good old days.” And she dressed with taste, her makeup was delicate, and if her skin had aged, it was fine as silk; her nose was young, her eyes as neat as violets. The week had been hot, but she was cool and slightly scented.

  “Not as hot as we had it in Cairo when your father was alive,” she said in her mannish voice.

  Time was restored: Father had returned to his grave.

  After being gashed by bombs during the war, the corner of early-Victorian London where Duggie and Sally live has “gone up.” Once a neighbourhood of bed-sitters, now the small houses are expensive and trim; enormous plane trees, fast-growing sycamores, old apple and pear trees bearing uneatable fruit, crowd the large gardens. It was to see the garden and to meet Duggie, who was over from Brussels on one of his monthly trips, that Mother had really come: in the country she is an indefatigable gardener. So is Sally, who opened the door to us. One of the unspoken rules of Sally and myself is that we do not kiss when I go to her house; her eyes were as polite as glass (and without the quiver to the pupils they usually have in them) as she gave her hand to my mother. She had drawn her fair hair severely back.

  “Duggie is down in the garden,” Sally said to Mother and made a fuss about the steps that lead down from her sitting-room balcony. “These steps my husband put in are shaky—let
me help you.”

  “I got used to companionways going to Egypt,” said Mother in her experienced voice. “We always went by sea, of course. What a lovely garden.”

  “Very wild,” said Sally. “There used to be a lawn here. It was no good, so we dug it up.”

  “No one can afford lawns nowadays,” said my mother. “We have three. Much better to let nature take its course.”

  It is a clever garden of the romantic kind, half of it a green cavern under the large trees where the sun can still flicker in the higher branches. You duck your way under untidy climbing roses; there is a foreground, according to season, of overgrown marguerites, tobacco plants, dahlias, irises, lilies, ferns—a garden of wild, contrived masses. Our progress was slow as Mother paused to botanise until we got to a wide, flagged circle which is shaded by a muscular fig tree. Duggie was standing by the chairs with a drink in his hand, waiting for us. He moved a chair for Mother.

  “No, I must see it all first,” Mother said. “Nice little magnolia.”

  I was glad she noticed that.

  There was a further tour of plants that “do well in the shade”—“Dear Solomon’s-seal,” she said politely, as if the plant were a person. A bird or two darted off into other gardens with the news—and then we returned to the chairs set out on the paved circle. Duggie handed drinks to us, with the small bow of a tall man. He is lazily well-made, a bufferish fellow in his late fifties, his drooping grey moustache is affable—“honourable” is how I would describe the broad road of sunburned baldness going over his head. His nose is just a touch bottled, which gives him the gentlemanly air of an old club servant, or rather of being not one man but a whole club, uttering impressions of this and that. Out of this club his private face will appear, a face that puts on a sudden, fishy-eyed stare, in the middle of one of his long sentences. It is the stare of a man in a brief state of shock who has found himself suspended over a hole that has opened at his feet. His job takes him abroad a good deal and his stare is also that of an Englishman abroad who has sighted another Englishman he cannot quite place. Not being able to get a word in while the two women were talking, he turned this stare on me. “I missed you the last time I was home,” he said.